Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to do a full in-depth writeup trying every module like the excellent ones Neil Bowers has been doing, but I thought I’d write up a quick post on the choice I made, with example code, in case it helps other people looking to graph potentially irregularly-spaced time-based data samples in Perl easily.

Chart::Clicker looked to be a nice choice (with a nice example of doing just what I want given as the topic answer to a question on StackOverflow), but had a huge chain of dependencies, finally failing when demanding Cairo and various X11 libraries (on my headless server).

Chart::Strip seemed to do exactly what I wanted in a simple way, but I encountered a div-by-zero bug when dealing with a certain dataset with > 89 data points.

I reported this to the author, Jeff Weisgberg in RT #72288, and he promptly released 1.08 with a fix (thanks Jeff!).

Thanks a lot for this. I have been trying to generate PNG files from Chart::Strip as shown in the MAN but not able to do so. I was wondering if you could help me with it. The code prints garbage on my cli and does not create a file. I have manually tried writing to a PNG file but it does not work and gives file error.

Appreciate your help. I am using perl 5.10 due to some outdated libraries that I need.